The threat-a-clysm: what to do with hit and expertise

The recent change to threat modifiers has left threat stats in a pretty sad state. Admittedly, the answer to “how much hit/expertise do I need” has been “basically zero” since as far back as early Wrath of the Lich King, but there were still niche cases where those stats came in useful.

However, those reasons have eroded away one by one over the course of Cataclysm. Vengeance was the first strike, eliminating threat problems once a tank was taking steady damage. Then taunts were patched to no longer miss, as was our new off-GCD interrupt. The final nail in the coffin came this past week with the boost to threat modifiers, making even the initial 30-second snap aggro period worry-free. Threat is more or less dead, and that’s the intent according to the Dev Watercooler article. The threat-a-clysm is officially upon us.

But where does that leave threat stats?

Here’s what Ghostcrawler had to say in the Dev Watercooler article:

Blood DKs have a lot of control over the survivability they get from Death Strike, but as part of that gameplay, they have to actually hit their target. The other three tanks will get similar active defense mechanics

The idea of active mitigation abilities itself is a good one – that’s essentially the role that WoG and the new Holy Shield play, and they’re good, engaging, and fun mechanics. Tying active mitigation abilities to hit and expertise, on the other hand, is not. The Death Strike model, where your active mitigation ability can be nullified by the RNG, is arguably the worst way to implement an active mitigation ability. First I’ll discuss why it’s a bad idea, and then I’ll propose a better way to make hit and expertise valuable to tanks.

Active Mitigation: A How-(Not-)To

Active mitigation abilities are great because they put survivability in the tank’s hands. In other words, they give the tank control. That’s why they allow for greater depth of game play and a higher skill cap. These abilities are a tank’s way of saying “I need survivability, and I need it right now.” Choosing when that survivability happens is the interesting and important part of game play. Those choices are one way to distinguish an excellent tank from a puddle of tank-like goo on the floor, and often end up being the difference between a boss kill and a wipe.

Having Holy Shield fail because the RNG decided that it “missed” isn’t interesting. It’s frustrating, demoralizing, and most importantly, it’s not fun. It’s the antithesis to the goal of active mitigation, which is to make the tank’s only remaining job – mitigating damage – more fun. And the reason it’s all of those things is because it takes control away from the tank. If you can’t rely on the ability to give you the desired effect, it doesn’t feel like you have control anymore, because every time you go for your survival buttons you’re praying that the RNG doesn’t screw you over.

Furthermore, this sort of implementation doesn’t make threat stats any less mindless. It leads to one of two situations:

The theorycraft says that hit/exp are more important for survivability than dodge/parry, at which point it becomes mandatory to hit/exp cap

They’re less effective, and people still gear for 0 hit/exp.

Neither of those give us any thought-provoking decisions to make. Either we reach hit/exp cap, or we still ignore those stats. There’s no middle ground because you’re never going to say, “Well, 8% chance for Holy Shield to miss is too high, but 3% is acceptable.” It’s an on-demand survivability ability, which means either the tolerance for error is 0% and you can rely on it, or you don’t rely on it.

Out of the two situations, the former is far better because at least we have to juggle hit/exp caps. It’s a stretch to call that an “interesting” choice, but at least some thought has to go into item selection. And I must admit, it would be nice to have some hit and expertise again, simply because it irritates me when I get long strings of parries and dodges against a boss. If we’re doomed to have active mitigation tied to “threat” stats, I’d be happier if it led to mandatory hit and expertise soft-capping. But that still doesn’t make it a good solution.

The second situation is much worse, because it leads to incredibly frustrating gameplay. It means that we won’t be able to trust our active mitigation abilities and we won’t feel the sense of control they’re supposed to convey. This is the situation Death Knights are in right now, and they curse under their breath every time a Death Strike gets parried at an inopportune time. If Death Strike is the centerpiece of a DK’s active mitigation, it should simply not be able to be miss or the mitigation effect should occur on the cast rather than on hit. In short, it should just work. The result should depend on the player’s skill and decision making, not the roll of a die.

Threat Stats! – Huh! Good God, Y’all – What are they good for?

So then, what’s the solution for threat stats? We don’t want them for the sake of threat anymore, nor do they grant a large enough DPS to make them worth the survivability loss. It’s clear that to make threat stats attractive to tanks, they need to be tied to survivability because we’re already trading DPS/threat for survivability almost anywhere we can. But we don’t want them tied to active mitigation, either. What’s left?

The simplest solution, though a bit inelegant, is to tie them to passive survivability. Dodge and parry are passive survivability stats; they improve our survivability without any input on our part. You could imagine a simple talent that converts hit and expertise rating to a passive survivability stat, like armor:

Resolve of the Crusader: Grants X armor for every point of hit or expertise rating.

Tune X until one point of hit rating is comparable to the average damage reduction of one point of dodge or parry at reasonable levels of diminishing returns. It’s simple and effective, if not inspiring. But it gets the job done, and gives us interesting decisions to make, such as “do we want the additional smoothness that the armor gives us, or the greater overall damage reduction of the dodge/parry?” Note also that this wouldn’t require significant re-tuning of the tank classes, because we’re not getting “free” armor – it would all be coming from rating that’s currently invested in dodge/parry. We’d just be shifting it from avoidance to armor.

But again, it’s not a very elegant or inspiring solution. One drawback of the passive solution is that it doesn’t interact with our DPS rotation at all, which means it doesn’t give us any extra incentive to push our buttons. And we desperately need some sort of incentive to do that in the absence of threat. Luckily, there’s another implementation that does provide such a motivation. It’s somewhere in-between active and passive mitigation; let’s call it “semi-active mitigation.” Consider the following example talent:

Again, simple and effective, but this time a little more interesting. Now there’s an incentive for you to press buttons, because the fewer Crusader Strikes you cast the lower the armor buff’s uptime will be. It makes connecting with your attacks important for mitigation, which is exactly what has to happen to make threat stats attractive to tanks. And it gives us a motivation to optimize our rotation, which is an element that the threat changes have taken away from us.

There’s quite a bit of design space to play with here as well. X has to be chosen appropriately, again such that hit/expertise rating is comparable in survivability to dodge/parry. If Y is set to 3 seconds (the cooldown of CS), then there’s a linear relationship between hit rating and uptime; if instead Y is longer, it’s a nonlinear relationship which gives a natural diminishing returns curve. Balancing the diminishing returns of dodge/parry and hit/expertise would be a complex balancing act instead of just “hit/exp to cap,” making gearing decisions much more interesting.

The trigger could be converted from dealing damage to critical strikes (and expanding the source list to include Shield of the Righteous, Avenger’s Shield and Judgement), making crit a potentially interesting survivability stat as well. Or it could be a <50% chance to proc the effect on dealing damage with any ability, making the uptime variations as a function of hit and expertise larger. You could even imagine changing the effect – maybe turn it into a stacking absorption bubble like Savage Defense, or a stacking armor buff that gets consumed by any attack that deals damage, giving it some synergy with avoidance. There’s really a huge amount of variation in what you can do with this idea.

Note that this isn’t a new concept. Savage Defense is essentially the same thing, with the druid getting a passive survivability boost as a result of their offensive actions. In the druid’s case though, the effect is supposed to be significant enough to stand in for the Block mechanic; our form would have to be weaker than Savage Defense to remain balanced (though the druid version could use a buff as well, from what I’ve heard). Since all four tank classes would be getting some version of this, it seems reasonable that the druids would keep their absorb bubble while the plate classes would each get some variation of an armor implementation.

The point that bears repeating is that these semi-passive implementations cover all of the bases. They give us a reason to push buttons and turn hit and expertise into survivability stats on par with dodge and parry. And they accomplish the intended goals without subjecting our on-demand mitigation abilities to the RNG. In other words, they don’t void the tank’s sense of control, which helps keep tanking fun rather than frustrating.

19 Responses to The threat-a-clysm: what to do with hit and expertise

Getting a miss/parry for hitting DS at the right time is hell, trust me im a DK and this has killed me many of times. People argu “you have a cooldown in-case it does miss” ok fine. Hit that cooldown and live

what happens on the next string of unlucky hits when you have used your cooldowns, your fucked?

Personally after hitting my damage mitigation and getting miss/parry i feel very cheated i am being punished for doing the “right thing” at the right time. IMO DS should not miss. The Bloodshield/heal should always hit possibly the damage should still miss though.

In short it really sucks! I am so happy other tanks will feel the pain of this and i foresee 1000’s of QQ posts on blizzard forums about it.

I think it’s rather shallow to revel in the fact other tank classes might suffer a similar problem as DKs currently do, far better to change the system so that DKs abilities are better and they don’t have to suffer under such pain, rather than force everyone else to share it.

Something along the lines of Thecks last idea would work perfectly, along with some adjustment to DS specifically to ensure that the mitigation portion of the ability functions regardless (unless perhaps they chose to change the amounts healed/blocked to the point where hit/expertise capping was the best survival choice).

Regardless of what they do though, it should be based around making tanking fun, if a classes active mitigation abilities aren’t fun they should be changed so they are, rather than everyone else having their abilities cut down to be equally ‘un-fun’.

ABILITY NAME:
When you active ABILITY NAME you will mitigate damage equal to 7% of your HP or 40% of the damage you have taken in the last 5 seconds whatever is grater. This effect cannot miss/parry but the damage competent can.

Mastery: The amount ABILITY NAME mitigates will increase with X amount of mastery, Each point in mastery will increase the amount mitigated by X%.

Sorted. After this change is made design fights so tanks cant be burst down in 2 – 3 hits.

As a DK tank, I second Adam’s summary – missing with a DS swing is terrible. Having DS require a 9s cooldown and the buffed HP are lost is poor, and having DS use the same limited refresh resources as other core abilities is bad. In short – DKs are great to play as long as you significantly over gear the encounter, and nothing unplanned happens.
So yeah, in 5 mans they are great. In raids you will die a lot unless you are a fantastic player; and I’m not that great (yet).
Increase the timer on DS buff HP so that it is say 12-16s and we’ll see a massive amount of Control returned to the DK tank.

Really the only rune-using abilities you use are heart strike and death strike, which as long as you watch you runes and dont use up death runes for heart strike, you not competing for resources when using death strike.

I like this idea, and you’re right, it would have to be restricted. I’d suggest that only the boss’s current target can apply and stack the debuff. In the case of a tank swap, the debuff is already up, the boss’s target has changed so they can stack it.

Your solution is also a little bit like blood DK diseases, where they each put a significant debuff on the opponent that has some survivability value (though, this is devalued by the fact that the same debuffs can be applied by some other classes and they don’t stack).

Of course, your idea requires more button-pushing than is required to merely keep diseases up. I think it’s a good idea and thought I’d mention another example of where we can see this idea already in game.

I like the sound of zaephod’s idea that sounds really interesting would be hard to implement though but once in would add some amazing depth not just in personal choice of abilities but things like tricks would become a slight tank survivability CD
Could be something along the lines of your average dps over the last 20 seconds divided by 1000 is the percent it reduces boss melee damage by for example my max dps against baleroc was 15000 so that would reduce his damage by 15%
And I agree please don’t give us anything that resembles that broken set of mechanics that dks have

Running with that idea, it would sort of amount to a non-capped Demo Shout/Roar, Judgment of the Just, and DK equivalent. The more damage you do to the boss, the better your damage reduction would be.

Bear with me while I explore this a bit…It would need a base damage reduction, probably 5-8%. You’d have to be able to apply it rather frequently so you could get around the “A more powerful spell is already active” problem. Since it scales with damage done, a tank swap would result in the former tank doing less damage, so their debuff wouldn’t overwrite the current tank’s debuff. It would probably need capping too, to prevent things like Imprint or going with a pure dps set from getting too large of a reduction.

Next, we’d need to determine both the cap for the debuff and the rough stat equivalence needed to make threat stats into a form of mitigation stats. You wouldn’t want it to trump mastery for pure mitigation, but you’d want it to be close enough to where there’s a choice. Do you gear for skill-usage mitigation, pure-geared (passive from gear) mitigation, or avoidance for Boss X? The final question that must be answered: do you allow skill-usage mitigation to outpace pure-geared mitigation? Which wins and by how much?

Theck, I just wanted to thank you for all your great work over the years. I have retired from WoW but accomplished all that I wanted to. You helped me understand tanking and my tankadin better then I could have imaged and with that understanding came alot of fun playing the class. This is a big TY.

Are you by chance planning on playing SWToR as a tank? If so what class? I was wondering if I should eliminate my hopes of reading your posts in a future game. If you do play and tank, it might effect what tank class I role. All tanking classes can be fun, but when you know the class inside and out, that is what makes it really fun.

I don’t have any plans to play SWToR at this point. Even though I’m a fan of Star Wars, I don’t think I’d have time for another MMO. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t pick it up in the future, but probably not as long as WoW is alive and kicking.